Sean Spicer’s Last Day at the White House

Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, resigned on Friday, reportedly over President Trump’s hiring of Anthony Scaramucci as the new communications director.

Photograph by Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post via Getty

Sean Spicer, whose job, until Friday morning, was to speak
extemporaneously on behalf of the Trump Administration, was never much
good at extemporaneous speaking. Earlier this year, while working on a
piece about the West Wing’s mounting
conflicts with the press, I spent a week in the White House briefing room. The
week was full of Russia-related scandals, and significant news
broke several times a day—the kind of situation that has somehow come to feel both ominous and routine. At one briefing, Spicer was asked, “Can you
still say definitively that nobody on the Trump campaign . . . had any
contact with the Russians before the election?” His response: “I don’t
have any—there’s nothing that would conclude me that anything different
has changed with respect to that time period.” Before my article was
published, two fact checkers and I went over that quote a few times, to
make sure that we were getting it right. We didn’t want to be unfair to
Spicer. But the quote was accurate, and it was just about the most
charitable quote of his that I could find. The other sentences he
uttered that week—apart from the endless iterations of “I have nothing
on that” and “I’ll have to get back to you”—were, when rendered in
written language, somewhere between incredible and incomprehensible.

On Friday, President Trump appointed Anthony Scaramucci, a former
investment banker and TV talking head, as his new communications
director. Spicer, who held the title of press secretary, resigned
shortly afterward—reportedly in protest. Spicer has spent his career working as a
communications professional, and he
apparently worried that Scaramucci, who has no formal experience in public
relations and whose primary service to Trump was as a fund-raiser for
his campaign, would be unable to handle the job. But it’s impossible to
believe that Spicer, who has been an object of national mockery since
the first day of the Trump Administration, hadn’t considered resigning
many times before.

It was also an open secret in Washington, D.C., that Trump has long
considered replacing Spicer as his Administration’s chief spokesperson.
Several women were rumored to be in contention for the
job: Kellyanne Conway, Laura Ingraham, Kimberly Guilfoyle. Perhaps none
of them could be persuaded to take the job, for good reason: to be
Trump’s press secretary is to be the messenger who gets shot repeatedly.
Even so, Trump already had an articulate woman working in his press
office—Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who dissembles as often as Spicer but
does so with more confidence and flair. On Friday, Sanders was named
Spicer’s replacement as press secretary.

Why was Trump so slow to put Spicer out of his misery? Trump prizes
loyalty; despite his TV catchphrase, he goes to great lengths to avoid
firing people. Maybe he simply wanted to avoid conflict. Or maybe he
thought that, when compared to Spicer’s spluttering, his own
off-the-cuff speaking style looked downright Churchillian. It’s also
possible, as with so many of Trump’s decisions, that he was relying on
impulse rather than strategy. On Friday afternoon, Sanders introduced
Scaramucci for his first press conference at the White House. Spicer was
nowhere to be seen. After some trouble with the microphone, Scaramucci,
smoothly coiffed and looking calm, took questions from reporters,
promising to answer every last one. “I love the President,” he said,
several times. He also said, “The Navy SEALs would tell you that if
you’re gonna eat an elephant, you eat it one bite at a time. Sarah and I
are gonna do that together.”

Andrew Marantz, a contributing editor, has written for The New Yorker since 2011.